


Reach for the Shining Sun

by ExtraPenguin



Category: Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Slime Molds, Terraforming, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin
Summary: An account of what happened at another terraforming site before the shutdown signal, and what transpired after it.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 7
Collections: Space Swap 2020





	Reach for the Shining Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



It was a nice enough planet, Esva Gi thought. Not the most plum of potential targets, but well worth terraforming in this first wave of near-Earth sites. A bit warm and dry for human habitation, but the latter could be fixed with judicious application of icy comets onto the planet's face. There was plenty of matter for that in the outer solar system.

Her crewmembers wished to call the planet something related to deserts – several had sent the suggestion of Sahara, others championed lesser-known alternatives like Karakum and Tengger – but as the commander of the mission, it was Esva's choice that mattered. She'd considered several candidates of varying obscurity, from the slightly too on the nose Eden to the more obscure Mahoroba before settling on the name Shangri-La for her upcoming utopia.

Shangri-La orbited a K-type orange dwarf in its habitable zone. It had two rocky compatriots, one closer and one further from its mother star, and a small asteroid belt to the inside. There was one gas giant, and then an outer zone of icy comets that represented an inner encroachement of the system's Oort cloud. Water was easy to acquire.

The terraforming team dispatched a shuttle beyond the gas giant. Of the dozen specialists on the mission, the mechanical engineer Sandra Lingdown's psych evaluations were best suited for long solo projects. Esva sent her to the far reaches of the solar system to operate the drones that would send the balls of water ice to seed the planet.

Sandra Lingdown was the only conscious human in light-years. Everyone else had gone back under ice to wait out the cosmic timescales of creation. Only she was here, the kind shepherd who would tell her drones to find the wettest, iciest lumps and nudge their orbits until they hit Shangri-La at angles conducive to the water staying where it'd been put.

It was terribly boring. And like all bored engineers, Sandra turned to automation. After all, this was a relatively simple task, wasn't it? She should just leave it fully to the machines and only wake up to check on it every few years.

She reimained awake to watch the machines take care of the first few pieces of icy sludge. As nothing was amiss, she went on ice after the fifth one. As the chemicals worked to bring her under, she thought about the irony of the master of machines becoming an icy lump while the machines hurled icy lumps into the inner solar system.

This course of affairs played out exactly like it should. Sandra set a wake-up for herself for a month before the others would wake up and went to sleep for the final time in the shuttle.

In the vacuum of space, the machines labored. They had been given instructions on how many tonnes of ice to send down, so they untiringly sought out icy clumps of sufficient size not to evaporate on the journey to the inner solar system, sacrificed one of their number to burrow into the clump and send the iceball tumbling to its doom and rebirth.

But even the mechanical must come to its end. And as that existence neared its end, it was liable to odd errors.

A little piece of cosmic radiation hit the shuttle's computer, in charge of all the drones, and flipped a bit. The error-check algorithms noticed this, of course, but they had grown corrupted over time and so their application only made the error grow.

The computer, now under belief that the quantity of water it was supposed to introduce to Shangri-La was positive infinity, told each and every one of the drones to find a piece of ice and send it towards the desired planet. It helpfully pointed them to the largest lumps left. The drones, without any intelligence of their own beyond propulsion calculations, heeded its orders.

Sandra would have noticed, had she been awake. When she woke, most of the drones would still be deflectable; she'd merely have to justify her actions to an annoyed Esva Gi who'd want her drones back.

She never had the chance to do so. Scant days before her programmed awakening, Old Earth sent its children the shutdown message. In the system of Shangri-La, no-one was awake to see their death.

While humans thawed in death, the machines were on fixed courses in their own icy tombs. Some had yet to launch the burn before shutdown. Some had been mid-burn and thus ended up on odd trajectories. Some had finished the burn and were headed for Shangri-La. The planet did not quite get all of those in the final category: some had gravitational interactions with other bodies that brought them just off-target.

Nonetheless, Shangri-La received more water than Esva Gi and her team had planned for. The fabled paradise resembled a swamp.

Time passed. The command ship, with its reservoirs of useful bacteria, had been in a low orbit around Shangri-La. Eventually, that orbit decayed, and the ship burned in the atmosphere, chunks raining down onto the surface.

This was not the careful release schedule the terraforming team had originally planned, but it was release nonetheless, and the organisms chosen for the first phase hardy. Life took root.

Under the burn of the far stars, the winds of time swept past the muddy pools, carrying with them the innumerable spores that had found this warm and wet planet an eden for their kind. Algae bloomed in the churned pools further warmed by occasional volcanism. The surface was dotted with worn-down craters, but otherwise flat – neither vast oceans nor towering peaks appeared on the planet's face.

One of the things that had survived the fall was the nanovirus of Doctor Avrana Kern's. Designed for monkeys and capable of affecting stomatopods and spiders and ants as well, on Shangri-La it found itself with a dearth of multicellular life to infect.

But what Shangri-La and its ecology had was time. The virus, long dormant in the soil, eventually managed to infect an amoeba.

The amoeba was a slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum. The infection event might've ended up a fluke of no impact to Shangri-La's future, but when the amoeba carrying the virus ran out of bacteria to feed on and aggregated into a motile slug and culminated into a fruiting body, the infected amoeba ended up not in the stalk but as a source of spores. These spores carried the virus within them as they germinated.

A slime mold didn't have much to work with, but on Shangri-La, time was plentiful for all who required it. The reproductive cycle of the slime mold required finding compatriots and collaborating with them to entrust its spores to the wind. Altruism, too, was natively present in the slime molds, as most of the amoebae of the fruiting body were part of the supporting stalk, rather than the spores which got to reproduce.

Many thousands of generations later, as amoebae aggregated together, something rudimentary started to awaken. It could sense heat, light, and humidity, and was compelled to seek out all three. If asked, it couldn't articulate why – wouldn't have understood the question, as there was no way to communicate questions to it – but it knew that those things were good and it should seek them out.

For a moment, the mists that enshrouded Shangri-La parted, and the K-type orange dwarf's light hit the slime mold and the soil around it. It reached up, up towards this greatest heat and light-

The mists returned. The slime mold thought for a moment of getting above whatever had shaded it, but there was nothing to climb on around it, and it could only reach the height of a few millimeters even in its ambulatory stage.

It continued producing its cellulose sheath and moving towards the warmest spot it could reach. But its little mind – for it had one, now, of sorts – couldn't shake its sudden desire to reach up, up, up towards the great source of heat and light.

And in this moment, it thought of manipulating its environment. If light was above, and it had nothing to climb up on, it would just have to create something to climb on.

Thus the slime mold diligently piled dirt high. When it had reached the limit of its endurance, it climbed up the pile.

It was only a few tens of centimeters high, but the slime mold was only a few millimeters long. In a process that took what was left of the day, it climbed up in a slimy trail until it reached the peak.

A few tens of centimeters wasn't enough to pierce the mists, the slime mold discovered to its disappointment, but it was warm and bright and humid enough. It settled into one spot and spent hours forming a fruiting body.

The single amoebae it gave birth to were mindless. But the nanovirus was doing its work on them as well, as they underwent mitosis, and when they in turn aggregated for reproduction, they carried with them the idea of affecting their environment. And as they affected their environment, they would discover the concept of tools.

It would take time to go from the discovery of tools to anything approaching civilization. But the one thing that Shangri-La had in plentiful supply was time.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized I had an opportunity to write about slime molds and could not resist.


End file.
